From Luna to New Horizons: The real future of space exploration

A combination image of Pluto, left, and its largest moon, Charon, taken by the New Horizons spacecraft and released Monday by NASA.

New Horizons sped by Pluto at around 6:50 this morning and if all went well we should receive some extraordinary images Wednesday to go with the great images that already have been released. NASA expects confirmation from New Horizons that it survived its 9½-year, 3 billion-mile flyby of Pluto to arrive a little before 8 tonight.

NASA has now visited every planet in what was our solar system until 2006, when Pluto was relabeled a dwarf planet. Pluto’s change in status came about because we now know the actual solar system is far different from the simple mechanical models many of us remember from school.

Except for the six Apollo moon landings between July 1969 and December 1972, human space flight hasn’t gone beyond where Yuri Gagarin went on April 12, 1961, when he became the first human in space as well as the first human to orbit Earth. But as we note in a new Viewpoints editorial, it’s incorrect to say human space exploration’s been stuck in low Earth orbit for the past 54 years. The New Horizons flyby of Pluto is a sublime, awe-inspiring reminder of the grand age of space exploration we have witnessed the past 50-plus years.

The 46th anniversary of the Apollo 11 moon landing is Monday. I’m as taken as anyone by the romance and adventure of Apollo, but I also have been fascinated for years by a parallel Soviet moon mission that hardly anyone remembers. In lunar orbit with Apollo 11 in July 1969 was a probe named Luna 15. Its mission was to land on the moon, drill into the surface and return a soil sample to Russia — and beat Apollo 11 back home.

Luna 15 crashed several hours after Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin completed their single, 2½-hour moonwalk. But the Soviets’ next attempt succeeded; Luna 16 returned to Earth on Sept. 24, 1970, with about a quarter of a pound of lunar soil.

Two later Luna probes also returned soil samples and two Soviet rovers roamed the moon’s surface in 1970 and 1973. We didn’t know it then, but time has proved that Apollo 11 was not the giant leap for mankind we imagined it was. It did not lead to vacations on giant rotating space stations, colonies on the moon or trips to Mars. The manned missions generated by the U.S.-Soviet space race in the 1960s conjured a future that turned out to be as false as jet packs.

Instead, Luna represented the future of space exploration. In fact, it was a future that had begun almost as soon as the space race began with the launch of Sputnik in 1957. Luna 1 flew past the moon in January 1959; eight months later Luna 3 photographed the moon’s dark side. NASA’s Mariner 2 flew by Venus in 1962 — our first close encounter with another planet. Mariner 4 flew by Mars in 1965 and sent back to Earth the first close-up images of another world. Luna 9 landed on the moon in 1966 and transmitted images of the lunar surface. And on the explorations magnificently have gone.

Landing astronauts on Mars would be a tremendous achievement. And who knows? Our survival may depend on our getting there some day. But for now, for a fraction of the cost, and with a far greater scientific return, we could send a dozen rovers to roam Mars and return soil samples to Earth. We could probe the possibly life-containing oceans beneath the icy surfaces of Jupiter’s moon Europa and Saturn’s moon Enceladus — and return samples to Earth from the geysers that jet out of Enceladus’ southern pole. We could float on the hydrocarbon lakes of Saturn’s moon Titan, park orbiters around Uranus and Neptune, and visit Eris, a dwarf planet similar to Pluto — and still have money left over for several other missions.

We could fully pursue the future that Luna and Mariner left for us decades ago.

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